I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
The Bill that I am introducing this evening, and for which I am seeking the support of the House, is a simple one. It sets out to do two small but vital jobs, and in the process, to demonstrate that we are capable of learning the lessons of bitter experience.
There are times in the life of every legislator when we have to face up to our own imperfections and inadequacies. In my case, this is such a time. I have been aware for some years of the gaps in our criminal justice system that are addressed by this Bill, and I have to say that it is a matter of regret to me that I have not addressed them before now. We all of us go from day to day, pursuing our busy lives, attending to the problems that are creating the most pressure, and often ignoring issues that are nagging away at the backs of our minds. The issues addressed by this Bill have been around for many years, but it has taken the experience of the Guildford Four to wake many of us up to those issues. This Bill springs directly from that experience, and I hope that we are capable of learning the lessons that the case of the Guildford Four has taught us.
It has been said before, and is worth saying again, that the release of the Guildford Four touched a chord in every Irish heart. The conviction had been slow to take hold here, and yet had been growing for several years, that these people were innocent, that the confessions which had been wrung out of them under conditions of extreme duress and brutality were worthless. It has emerged in the course of the dramatic events that have unfolded since their release that they were more than innocent. These were not people convicted on the basis of confessions that were wrongfully procured — they were actually framed.
Confessions and statements were altered to suit the perception of the police and the prosecuting authorities as to what was most incriminating; details were added to increase the damage; the statements of witnesses who could have helped to clear the Four were suppressed; their defence lawyers were hindered at every turn. There was a considerable conspiracy to secure the convictions of the Guildford Four, and the result was that they emerged, fifteen years later, as the victims of the grossest act of misfeasance in British legal history. There was misfeasance in law enforcement and in the administration of the law, on a scale that surpasses anything that has yet been discovered.
Now the Guildford Four have to learn to live in the free world again. They will be financially compensated for what has been done to them, of course, and hopefully there will be no cheeseparing in the allocation of that compensation. But nothing can ever compensate them for the loss of a whole lifetime of growth and experience.
The night the Birmingham bombs went off, I was travelling on a train from Holyhead to London. The atmosphere when I arrived in London the following morning was indescribable, and unforgettable. It was to some extent at least that sort of atmosphere that led to the imperative need, as the police saw it, for early convictions in the Birmingham and Guildford cases. Convictions at any cost — even at the cost of fifteen years of life for four innocent people, and Six more who were convicted of the Birmingham bombs.
My generation was young then, and the world was a good place to live in. In the years since then, while the Guildford Four were in jail, almost in a state of suspended development, most of us got married and became parents; we watched our children grow and learn to walk and talk and go to school; we developed jobs and careers, and took a more active interest in the world around us. All of us here went through a similar pattern of experience and development in that period. We also experienced many of the humdrum and routine things that have made the quality of life more enjoyable and fulfilling. We went to the movies or the theatre, we followed our favourite football teams — some of us have memories of great Kerry teams, others of our Triple Crown victories, still others of great athletic performances.
All of these things, the things that add up to a body of enriching and maturing experience, were denied to the Guildford Four. They must adjust now to a world that went about its business while they were left to vegetate in jail. The fact that they did not vegetate, that they remain as articulate now as when they were first incarcerated, is a tribute to them and to the families and friends who supported them throughout their ordeal. It is no tribute, however, to the British system of justice.
Justice emerges from the aftermath of the Guildford Four battered, with faith in its impartiality weakened, perhaps fatally, and the rule of law undermined. It will take many years, and a great deal of effort, on the part of the authorities and the police to restore the rule of law in Britain to its rightful place. And there are many other implications of the case as well — implications for extradition from Ireland, for the administration of justice in the North of Ireland, for the cases of other individuals and groups, for our relations generally with the United Kingdom. I propose to deal with all of those implications in the debate which will take place later this week, and I will not go into them here.
Instead, I want to say this. It would be arrogant, and indeed ignorant, for us to look at the case of the Guildford Four from this side of the Irish Sea, and profess great concern at the implications of the case for British justice alone. There are implications for us too, lessons that must be learned, ways that we must put our own house in order.
The Irish courts have, by and large, interpreted our Constitution to strengthen the rights of the accused but we are still a jurisdiction governed largely by the common law. The defects in English law that made the convictions of the Guildford Four possible are equally evident in our own legal system. We are debating tonight a Bill to remedy some of those defects. Let all those Members of this House who have expressed legitimate worries about the implications of the Guildford Four case for the legal system across the water bear those worries in mind as this legislative provision is discussed and debated in this House.
Let it not be forgotten that this entire matter emphasises that there are several respects in which English law is superior to our own in these regards. For instance, we still maintain, in the Criminal Justice Act, 1964, the death penalty for certain crimes. This provision must be repealed as a matter of urgency. Many of us were gratified to hear the Minister for Justice undertake recently to bring a Bill forward to deal with this matter soon and it is my fervent wish and intention that this Dáil will see the end of the death penalty. We will give any encouragement we can to the Minister.
However, more to the immediate point, the English criminal justice system has what has now proven to be a crucial facility which does not exist in our law. There is in Ireland absolutely no mechanism, after the normal appeal process has run its course, for a criminal conviction to be reopened before a court for the purposes of re-examining the full factual basis for that conviction. If we learn one lesson from this entire tragic episode, let it be the necessity for the immediate introduction of such a procedure. To this end section 3 of our Bill empowers the Minister for Justice to refer to the Court of Criminal Appeal any conviction on indictment, whether at the petition of the accused or on the Minister's own initiative, for the purpose of a full rehearing — both on fact and on law — of the basis of the conviction.
After the statements that have been made, by members of all parties, in the House and outside it, regarding the Guildford Four case, I can conceive of no possible objection to this provision. I believe the case for taking such a step is both unanswerable and long overdue.
Our Bill also seeks to address an equally grave problem highlighted by the Guildford Four case. This is the fact that in both England and Ireland accused persons may be convicted and sentenced upon the basis of no more than an alleged inculpatory statement or confession, made in police custody and witnessed by no one but police officers. The voluntariness of such confessions may frequently be attested to only by the police; the very circumstances in which such confessions were made may be determined only by the evidence of police officers.
The Guildford Four case provides urgent contemporary proof of the dangers inherent in a system which enables a person to be convicted on such a basis, without any other evidence linking the accused with the crime. Yet every person who has been exposed for any length of time to the administration of justice in our criminal courts knows how often confessions allegedly made by an accused are introduced as evidence.
Everyone familiar with our criminal courts knows how often the accused will deny the crime and reject his confession and everyone familiar with our system knows how often such confessions constitute the entirety of the State's case against accused persons.
One English judge, delivering an opinion as long ago as 1893, expressed the matter well, when he said:
It is remarkable that it is of very rare occurrence for evidence of a confession to be given when proof of the prisoner's guilt is otherwise clear and satisfactory; but, when it is not clear and satisfactory, the prisoner is not unfrequently alleged to have been seized with the desire born of penitence and remorse to supplement it with a confession — a desire which vanishes as soon as he appears in a court of justice.
From the above statement, made not far short of one hundred years ago, it will be seen that the issue of the propriety of relying exclusively on confessions as evidence is not a new one.
In seeking to establish a statutory provision requiring confessions made in police custody to be corroborated by independent evidence, I am not seeking to cast any aspersions whatever on the Garda as a force. Far from it. Indeed I am very conscious of the struggle that the Garda have had to wage against crime and terrorism in recent years, and of the difficulties they confront in bringing criminals of all kinds to justice. I am conscious, too, of the debt we owe to the Garda Síochána, as a police force which have been successful in our service in the detection of crime and the conviction of criminals but I believe the measures I am proposing here are every bit as much in the interests of the Garda, and the perception of the Garda, as they are in the interests of the general public and accused persons.
Leaving to one side the rare occasions when British and Irish police have been suspected of subjecting those in their custody to actual violence, the fact remains that many suspects find the very fact of being detained in police custody so intimidating and overwhelming that statements made in such conditions of confusion and disorientation are often unreliable. This is of particular concern in the case of the young, the less privileged, the least educated members of society and those least integrated into it.
In this connection, since this Bill was published, a colleague of mine has described to me an experience he had when he was considerably younger. As a result of mistaken identity, he was taken into police custody and detained for six hours in a Garda station. There he was questioned continuously by four gardaí in succession, in a bare, cold room, in the small hours of the morning. He was well treated, in the sense that he was at no time threatened with, or subjected to violence, but it was made very clear to him that he was not believed, and he was continuously urged to come clean, to tell the truth about the matter under investigation. He has told me that the experience was unforgettable, that he was at times frightened, at times angry, and that, as the night wore on, he became more and more desperate to get out of the station, even to the extent that had the experience lasted much longer, he would have confessed to anything rather than remain there.
Happily, the mistake that had been made at midnight was discovered by one of the gardaí as dawn was breaking. My colleague was told that he was free to go, that there would be no charge brought against him and he was free to leave the police station. Twenty years later he still vividly remembers that experience as being one of the most frightening of his life. As I said at the outset, he was not ill treated in any way by any member of the Garda.
Many lawyers could recount similar experiences — some with less fortunate and less happy endings than that. These experiences are compounded for many who suffer them, as I said earlier, by the fact that they are young, or not well-educated, or are in some way on the margin of our society. Yet the current law on arrest and detention for questioning is one which operates most unfairly against those who need its protection most. For instance, while the courts have asserted that a person in detention has a right of reasonable access to a lawyer, there is absolutely no obligation on the Garda to inform him of this right. This contrasts starkly with the position in the United States. Similarly, while a person in police custody is generally under no obligation to incriminate himself, the police are under no constitutional obligation to inform him of this fact. Again, this is in stark contrast to the position in the United States.
The law here confers rights, but it operates most unfairly against those who do not know what are their rights. One of the ironies of this is that hardened criminals are much more used to coping with police custody than innocent, young or poor people — and they are much less likely to make self-incriminating statements while in a Garda station than somebody young and disoriented. For that reason alone, I would find it difficult to accept the argument that change along the lines we advocate would act to impede law enforcement.
The point has also been made that this Bill would act against rigorous and fair enforcement of the law where somebody surrendered himself to the Garda and confessed to a crime. There is no reason it should. The Bill is aimed at outlawing uncorroborated confessions made by persons under the duress of police custody. We will be open to secure agreement to any and all amendments that would improve the legislation on Committee Stage and urge other parties in the House to work with us in that way.
The major point about which we must satisfy ourselves is this: could a Guildford Four case ever occur in this jurisdiction? My answer to that question — and I believe this firmly — is yes, it could. One does not have to look as far as England to see what can and has happened in similar circumstances, nor are all the examples to do with terrorists or political offences. I should like to give the House two examples of what I mean. I will begin by reading these couple of sentences:
Ned, Mike, and I left our house at 3.50 a.m.... we drove through Tralee, on through Dingle town for about six miles and we stopped at a place where the road runs beside the sea, and Ned who was driving got out and opened the boot of the car and took out the bag containing the baby and threw it into the sea. It was about 5.30 a.m. when Ned threw the bag into the sea. You could see the water from the road where we were parked and when the bag was thrown in, it sank and resurfaced and floated on the water.